1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing apparatus, a method of controlling the printing apparatus, and a storage medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the printing market called print on demand (POD) or production, a business system in which printing is preformed when an order is received from a customer, and the output product is surely supplied to the customer within the delivery date has been established. At such site of the printing market, a quick operation in the mass print production is a very important factor. For this reason, in many cases, an operator specifically trained for various operations is provided to a printing apparatus.
The operator manages operations expertly, for example, supply and replacement of consumable goods such as paper and toner, print job management, job ticket editing, transportation of output products, and finishing operations such as cutting and bookbinding. Among such operations, the operator needs to pay the most attention to maintain the operation rate of the printing apparatus to a high rate as much as possible.
For example, when a necessary consumable material has run out during print processing of a print job, the printing apparatus has to be stopped once by stopping a printing engine to stop the print processing. In such a case, the printing apparatus does not resume the printing processing until the operator has completed the supply and replacement of the necessary consumable material. In another case, when paper stacked on a discharge tray has reached to its maximum number of sheets that can be stacked thereon, the printing apparatus stops the printing engine to stop the print processing.
In this case, the printing apparatus does not resume the print processing until the operator removes a printed output product from the discharge tray. Such period of time when the printing apparatus is forced to wait for the operation of the operator and the print processing is temporarily stopped is called “downtime”. Once downtime occurs, the print processing is not resumed until the operator has completed necessary operation. In addition, the decrease in a fixing temperature in the printing engine requires heating processing to be performed again, and this takes a long time to be ready for performing the printing processing again.
Accordingly, a method for enabling the operator to perform necessary processing prior to the occurrence of downtime has been proposed.
For example, in a method discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2004-330781, print time estimation for each job is displayed in a graph. In this graph, the color of the time estimated for the supply and replacement of a consumable material is changed and displayed in the graph to enable the operator to recognize in advance when the supply and replacement work is to be done. This enables the operator to supply and replace the necessary consumable material before the material runs out to prevent the occurrence of downtime.
According to the above-described Japanese Patent Application, the operator is able to know in advance the time when an operation is to be done. The time should be exact, however, the accuracy is not perfect since the time is an estimated time, and some estimation error is included. The estimation error factors include warm-up processing of the printing engine. In a state where the printing engine is ready for printing, the estimation of a print time is relatively easy. On the other hand, when the printing engine requires warm-up processing, in addition to the time necessary for actual print processing, the warm-up time needs to be estimated.
The time necessary for the warm-up processing largely differs depending on the conditions of the printing engine at the time when the print job starts. At the time right after the start of the printing engine, when the printing apparatus is in a power saving mode after non-use state of the printing apparatus, or when long downtime occurs, heating operation and various kinds of preparation processing of a printing engine fixing unit are necessary. Consequently, the warm-up processing takes a long time. Especially, the time necessary for the warm-up processing increases as the size of the printing engine increases, and, in some cases, it takes several tens of minutes.